Food Wars

[zenolalia]

Ohohoho it's fun ti have to think of silly titles for posts sometimes. I'm glad tumblr doesn't require titles, but I do enjoy them.

Anyway, I'm crossposting this one. I think it's worth storing, and maybe that this platform will be more conducive to the type of conversation I'd like to have with this regards.

So.

Tumblr OP, with Mino's tags here.

US Americans are, by and large, disconnected from food production in a way that I honestly was not equipped to understand based on where I grew up. Due to a combination of location and poverty, my family and community during childhood were heavily built around hunting for meat, farming for vegetables, and managing food waste through small animals (chickens, dogs, maybe a pig if you're rich/clever/weird enough to pen it, etc).

I didn't realize until the pandemic when "backyard chickens" became a "trend" just how separate my experience was from the norm.

I always perceived grocery stores as something for.... well. People with money to travel to them, growing up. We bought food there monthly in the winter, and saved our money on vegetable farming and hunting in the summer to afford it.

And I think what I've just described sounds like an unfathomable, impossible dreamscape from one of my solarpunk fantasies or whatever.

Or else sounds like a hellish monstrosity, if you're more familiar with rural poverty and food deserts.

But like... it's neither of those really. It's just... a food system that isn't as tied to the industrial complex as most in the US.

And that modest disconnect still sounds like a made up imagination world to most people in this country. That's how bad the disconnect between food, ALL food, and the average US American is.

And that's without even touching on the way foods native to various parts of the US are considered broadly inferior/filthy compared to colonial imports, including and especially with regards to meats.

===End of tumblr post===

I'm still just thinking about this subject a lot. I've talked before, especially on this blog, about food based racism I experienced growing up. But as I entered adulthood and left rural living behind, I experienced a peculiar sort of food classism (?) instead. The idea that I know how to manage a small scale farmstead because... because why would't I? Who DOESN'T???

It's still strange to me.

But then, I still have to remind myself that just because I have paranoid delusions about mass persecution that are exacerbated by real world politics, and thus literally spend a lot of time preparing for the apocalypse, I am not a "prepper"either.

After all, my preparations include making sure I'm up to date on current food processing safety standards, that I have adequate sewing supplies, that I know how to treat common poultry injuries and infections, that stuff.

you know.

actually useful skills.

Anyway, the disconnect is real and it confuses me to no ends.

Do you know most Americans not only have never killed a fish or game animal, but haven't even seen one be killed? That's so weird to me. How do you live like that??

Anyway, IDK, what are your thoughts??

Comments

[cimorene]

I'm not nearly as disconnected from food and agriculture most in the us because one of my aunts had a small farm and raised ducks and chickens for food when I was a child, and my wife grew up on a sheep farm and then we moved to her hometown. But I've still never seen a livestock animal killed in person.

The strangest thing about this disconnect to me is the bizarrely widespread denial among dog- and cat-owning Americans of the pets' predatory nature. People construct their pets as good and nice, and killing animals as something good and nice individuals don't do, so even though they feed themselves and their pets meat, they're shocked at the reality of pets killing prey, even just, for example, hearing that my cat catches bugs and saying something "Gross!" I knew a husky owner who maintained the dog had killed multiple cats (who broke into his enclosured yard) 'by accident', 'just playing'.

[zenolalia]

I am asking this with absolute sincerity: you've seen someone kill and clean a fish or something though, right? That's sort of what I mean as my baseline. I understand that not everyone has slaughtered a chicken, but the fact that most americans have never even killed a fish is so wild to me given how much meat and fish we eat!!

[cimorene]

Hm... I've been present when people were going fishing and I've put a worm on a hook, but I think I've only seen fish after they were killed (or before, in a bucket). I've definitely never seen one gutted or cleaned in person, only on TV. I grew up far away from the coast, where only freshwater fish was really eaten regularly by locals, but we weren't locals.

My mom made a few seafood dishes, mostly shrimp, but she didn't really do fish. She grew up poor in the Midwest in the 60s, and her grandparents farmed, so SHE definitely had seen chickens slaughtered and dressed - I think only chickens - but most of her childhood was in towns, lots of canned food and cheap cuts of meat, but all from the grocery store.

[zenolalia]

Wow, that's interesting!! I suppose when people say I grew up somewhere "30 years behind" this is what they meant, haha

[cimorene]

My wife, in contrast, spent much of her childhood on a sheep farm in Finland, where it was normal to her that they had an extra deep freezer that often held a whole dead lamb. I'm not sure if she's ever done the killing herself though.

[feotakahari]

TBF I’m not sure my parents’ pets understand that there’s a difference between killing a prey animal and playing with it. Killing is just the kind of “play” domestic dogs and cats do with prey animals, after which they have delicious meat and no reason to waste it.

[zenolalia]

No, that's fair. My service dog is a retriever mix, so he simply doesn't understand the difference between playing fetch with a tennis ball, or playing fetch with a chicken trying to escape his jaws. That's why it's my responsibility as his handler to keep him away from birds and the like, only being off leash in controlled environments, etc. Pets just don't see a difference between playing with prey and playing with toys.

[silvernheart]

even as someone who grew up in suburban america that mindset has perplexed me, honestly. like i have hangups about food waste and things like that that stem from just knowing and thinking about how a real animal died to feed me, and i don't want to waste its sacrifice. but it's not anything i was explicitly taught so much as just a connection that seems so simple and obvious to me, it's still incredibly weird to find other people who don't seem to, say, think of beef and cattle as even the same thing besides in some vague abstract sense.
i feel like this is also connected to almost everyone i've met who hears i've had things like tripe and liver immediately get grossed out and weird about it like. they're just parts of the animal? a steer isn't just a walking meat cube?

idk. on the other hand i don't think it'd be easy to bring myself to kill an animal directly, but my prime concern with that is i don't actually trust myself to do a good enough job to end its life quickly and without pain. maybe that's not really any better than any other reason for not being able to, but like. i dunno. most of my feelings and experiences on this topic seem to diverge a lot from other people raised in the suburbs so. idk what to make of any of it, i just also wish so many people here weren't so strange about food and where it comes from, and who gets it to their plate.

[zenolalia]

Haha oh man, I do hate tripe but purely texturally. It's sooooooo spongy, I hate chewing it. But yeah, I know a lot of people naturally, as you did, foster a sense of connection to their food! But, so many others... yeah! It's a strange disconnect! It reminds me in a way of people who forget that human beings are animals.

[wolffyluna]

...yeah, I'm just having the realisation that:
a) I have never personally been in the same place as a meat animal when it was slaughtered
b) I have seen (non sensationalised) footage of animals being slaughtered, and I have been in the same place as a freshly dead beef cow (though it had not been killed for meat purposes and I was not there when it was killed)
c)...this somehow might be more exposure to freshly dead animals than the average Australian?

Which seems very *weird.*

I've also noticed that contrast with preppers, as well? There was one article that has stuck in my mind that was looking at the lives of different prepper households, and there was such a contrast between between "I have filled my basement with GUNS and BEANS" vs "MEAT RABBITS. YOU GET MEAT RABBIT. YOU GET A MEAT RABBIT. EVERYONE GETS A MEAT RABBIT. IN CASE THE WORLD ECONOMY COLLAPSES" vs "we are diabetics who live in a rural place. If a once in 50 years tornado came through and we were not prepared, we would die, so we have... prepared for that?"

[monsterqueers]

Yeah a lot of people seem very disconnected from food.
Like ive grown my own food(mostly low effort veggies and herbs) and fished and gutted my catches and caught and ate frogs and sea snails and my mum keeps chickens for eggs, and ive eaten venison (though didnt personally hunt it, I just got a share for cooking venison stew for everyone haha), but I wouldnt call myself anywhere near a sustenance farmer/hunter. Its crazy to me that there are people whove never eaten something theyve caught.
I personally feel its why ARAs and militant vegans are such a phenomenon- they've never been present for what it takes to put the food on their plate, theyve never felt that connection to thousands and thousands of years of evolution of being a apex predator omnivore that farms and being part of that process beyond just buying something in a store.